Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Anti-culturalism

I've ranted often about how multiculturalism has created nothing more in those countries that espouse it than a loathing for their own culture. In an article that touches upon both the British press's gleeful reporting on the (false) story that Bush told Palestinian leaders that he attacked Iraq because God told him to and the Britons own attack on their pigs and flags, Mark Steyn makes this wonderful observation:

[M]isinterpretation is in the eye of the misinterpreter, and pandering to it ensures there will be a lot more.
We hear endlessly about 'systemic racism' in British institutions, but the really rampant contagion seems to be systemic auto-racism, a psychologically unhealthy predisposition to believe the worst only about one's own culture.
***
Why is George W. Bush's utterly unremarkable evangelical Christianity so self-evidently risible but complaints from British Muslims hung up over the 11th century are perfectly reasonable and something we should seek to accommodate? Where is the secular Left's "insensitivity" when you need it? No doubt the bien pensants will still be hooting at born-again Texans on the day the House of Lords gives a second reading to the Sharia Bill.

The whole article's worth reading, but these words especially charmed me.
UPDATE: The Independent Women's Forum has a bracing dose of American-style anti-Anti-Culturalism, which reminds us that, contrary to what many would like to believe, European culture was, in fact, more sophisticated than the culture of the Americas (something that some of us might think is changing now in a pendulum like movement). The same post reminds us that the larger cultural outposts of these "peaceful" indigenous people were drenched in blood from torture and human sacrifice.